Over the break I was lucky enough to have my older sister come into town to visit me for nearly two weeks. Unfortunately, we did not make it up to Perlis so she could really see where I was living but we did some traveling within peninsular Malaysia—Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Melaka—and then on to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam for a few days. While it was definitely difficult to travel together for two weeks, something we had never done before, it was cool to be able to show her a small piece of this country I have called home for the past five months.
Since being here I have often lamented about the fact that I am in a world of strangers. My co-workers at school barely know anything about me. The worlds we grew up in were so far removed from one another in so many ways it makes it difficult for them to conceptualize my life in the United States. And while I have grown incredibly close with the four girls in my state, especially my housemates, there is only so much you can know about a person who you have only met a few months ago. While it was really wonderful to have someone who I have known for quite literally my entire life with me, my sister’s visit made it glaringly obvious that this life I am living now is not really knowable for you all, the people who read my blog and leave me WhatsApp voice messages, my friends and family. As hard as it is for the Malaysian people in my life here to understand my life back home, it will be just as difficult for people back home to understand my life here.
Even after being here and getting a taste of the heat, food, and culture it was hard for my sister to really understand what I was experiencing even though she was right there next to me. Part of this is because she was here very much as a tourist, we visited popular cities, went to museums, and tried the most popular foods. She had me as a guide—though in many ways I am still trying to figure it all out too—but I haggled down prices, translated menus, bought bus tickets, planned travel and called rides. Not saying that it was a bad thing or even complaining about having the responsibility, but through this trip there was really no way for her to understand what it was like for me to live and exist in my community for almost a year. In this community I am both an outsider and an insider, I know things and am still figuring it out, I am a resident of Malaysia and in many ways still a tourist. This semi permanent position in both this job and this community is so complex that it is really difficult to put into words.
A great example of this was about a month and a half ago I was on the phone with one of my friends during a break I had at school. Ultimately, we were trying to hash out the details of the plan to meet me at the end of the grant term and travel through South East Asia together but, as friends do, we began chatting about our respective lives at present. As I was explaining to her how removed I felt from the students and teachers at my school, detailing how difficult it is to feel appreciated, a group of female students walked past me. As they passed they erupted in a chorus of “good morning teacher”, “I love you teacher”, and “how are you teacher”! I replied back “good morning students, I am fine and I of course I love you too!” My friend, upon hearing this, was basically un able to understand how, though I regularly received bouts of verbal affection from students I could feel disillusioned or disconnected from them. I struggled to explain to her the differences in relationship norms between students and teachers in Malaysia and the US and how, with my position being somewhere near teacher but not quite, informed my relationship with students. When I went home and told my roommates about it they both understood perfectly how the covert disconnection was there even with such overt expressions of love and happiness about my presence.
The only people who truly understand my experience that I am having are the people who have lived it. (And really only the people who have been ETAs on peninsular Malaysia because Borneo is really like a totally different country.) I have realized just how much less needs to be said when telling a story, or detailing a problem, when talking to a ETA or a coordinator than with someone from back home. While yes, of course, my family and friends back in the States do know me better than anyone with me in Malaysia, the people here will always understand the context of this experience much more. I, for so long, thought it would be easier for me to be here if I could just bring my whole life with me, but that isn’t how it works is it? It would be easier to be myself with the people who I have known longer, who no longer need an explanation about what makes me laugh, cry, or angry. The familiarity of life back home is easier for me to just be Naja. But here I am more than that, I am Naja in Malaysia. And Naja in Malaysia needs what Naja in the USA cannot give her which is allies in this experience.
So thank goodness for all the weirdos who also decided to come along on this journey. We did not begin it together but we are going through it together. Midyear break was ultimately a reminder of the feeling I had of being surrounded by everyone else in the cohort at the start of this journey so many weeks ago now. I felt at peace, I felt support and I felt a lot less alone. As isolating as this experience is I need only reach out to other people going through it when I need to talk to someone who needs no explanation at all, who do not try to offer solutions that they do not understand are not available, who understand how something can be both hilarious and frustrating, who can laugh at jokes that need too much context otherwise, and with whom I have developed a pseudo language of English with horrible grammar and a smattering of Malay words and idioms that really no one else (Malaysian or American) can really understand.
